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The day's news roundup + tonight's musical feature: Johnny Young

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Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features Johnny Young. Enjoy!

^{Johnny Young - I'm Doing All Right}

"The only way you can do that [decrease taxes, balance the budget, and increase military spending] is with mirrors."

-- John B. Anderson

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News and Opinion

Worth a full read:

The Pentagon Budget Should Be Cut by At Least $1 Trillion—But War Profiteers Won't Go Quietly

Even as Congress moves to increase the Pentagon budget well beyond the astronomical levels proposed by the Biden administration, a new report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has outlined three different ways to cut $1 trillion in Department of Defense spending over the next decade. A rational defense policy could yield far more in the way of reductions, but resistance from the Pentagon, weapons contractors, and their many allies in Congress would be fierce.

After all, in its consideration of the bill that authorizes such budget levels for next year, the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives recently voted to add $25 billion to the already staggering $750 billion the Biden administration requested for the Pentagon and related work on nuclear weapons at the Department of Energy. By any measure, that's an astonishing figure, given that the request itself was already far higher than spending at the peaks of the Korean and Vietnam Wars or President Ronald Reagan's military buildup of the 1980s.

In any reasonable world, such a military budget should be considered both unaffordable and deeply unsuitable when it comes to addressing the true threats to this country's "defense," including cyberattacks, pandemics, and the devastation already being wrought by climate change. Worst of all, providing a blank check to the military-industrial-congressional complex ensures the continued production of troubled weapon systems like Lockheed Martin's exorbitantly expensive F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which is typically behind schedule, far above projected costs, and still not considered effective in combat.

Changing course would mean real reform and genuine accountability, starting with serious cuts to a budget for which "bloated" is far too kind an adjective. ...

The Congressional Budget Office's new report charts a path toward a more rational approach to Pentagon spending, but the $1 trillion in savings it proposes should only be a starting point. Hundreds of billions more could be saved over the next decade by reassessing our national security strategy, cutting back the Pentagon's nuclear buildup, capping its use of private contractors, and scaling back the colossal sums of waste, fraud, and abuse baked into its budget. All of this could be done while making this country and the world a significantly safer place by shifting such funds to addressing the non-military risks that threaten the future of humanity.

Whether our leaders meet the challenges of today or continue to succumb to the power of the arms lobby is an open question.

Ex CIA analyst on hidden realities of Syria war and new novel 'Damascus Station'

Fresh scrutiny for Mexico after arrest of suspect in NSO spyware case

Mexico’s use of spyware made by NSO Group is facing new scrutiny following the arrest of a businessman on allegations that he used the surveillance tool to spy on a journalist.

The arrest of the businessman – who has not formally been named by Mexican prosecutors – comes months after a consortium of media outlets, including the Guardian, published a series of reports detailing how the phone numbers of thousands of Mexicans, including 50 people linked to the country’s current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, appeared on a leaked list of numbers selected by government clients of the Israeli spyware company for possible surveillance.

Journalists, as well as lawyers, activists and prosecutors also appeared on the list. In the wake of the stories by the Pegasus project, Obrador called his predecessors’ alleged use of spyware “shameful” and said his own government would bar use of the surveillance tool. ...

The arrest marks the first legal action in the country against an individual accused of being linked to the alleged cyber-spying campaign. Media reports said the man was linked to a company that served as an intermediary between NSO and Mexican authorities.

Mexico is known to have been one of NSO’s first clients. About 30 contracts were reportedly signed by the governments of President Felipe Calderón and President Enrique Peña Nieto between 2006 and 2018, though officials say some of the contracts appear to have been disguised as equipment purchases.

Chilean president Piñera impeached over Pandora papers revelations

Chile’s President Sebastián Piñera has been impeached by the lower house of congress, setting up a trial in the nation’s senate over allegations he favored the sale of a family property while in office. The vote to impeach passed with the bare minimum of 78 votes needed in the 155-member chamber of deputies, and followed a marathon 20-hour session. Sixty-seven legislators voted against impeachment, including several members of the opposition. Others abstained or were absent.

Piñera is unlikely to be removed by the 43-member upper house, where the opposition has only 24 of the 29 votes needed to oust a president. But the trial will come in the heat of a general election campaign. The first round of general elections is set for 21 November and Piñera’s term ends on 11 March. Chile does not permit presidential re-election to consecutive terms.

Shock Russiagate Update!

White House rushes with infrastructure fixes for US economy

The Biden administration is relying on infrastructure dollars to help fix the clogged ports and blanket the nation with internet access — but a series of initiatives rolled out on Tuesday show that the urgent pace might not be fast enough to address the immediate needs of an economy coping with a supply chain squeeze and a shift to remote work.

President Joe Biden spoke with the CEOs of Wal-Mart, Target, UPS and FedEx on Tuesday about how to relieve the supply chain challenges as ships are still waiting to dock at some of the country’s leading ports. The key problem is that these ports are experiencing record volumes of shipping containers as the economy has recovered from the pandemic. ...

Yet the concrete policy steps being discussed by the administration show that there is no quick fix to supply chain issues that are still hurting smaller businesses and causing consumers to face higher prices. Nor can the administration build out a national broadband network fast enough as more Americans are pivoting toward remote work.

Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo highlighted at the White House briefing the $65 billion for broadband access in the the $1 trillion infrastructure package that cleared the House on Friday. She said that jobs would be created and poorer Americans would receive “affordable” internet service, though she did not spell out a precise dollar amount on what the monthly bills could be. ...

Similarly, the administration announced plans on Tuesday to identify and pay for possible upgrades to U.S. ports within the next 90 days — hoping to ultimately tamp down the inflation being caused by ships waiting to dock and a shortage of truck drivers to haul goods.

McDonalds Workers Epic WALK OUT For Higher Wages

Payday Report's Mike Elk on the Nationwide Labor Strike Wave and More

US food banks struggle to feed hungry amid surging prices

U.S. food banks already dealing with increased demand from families sidelined by the pandemic now face a new challenge — surging food prices and supply chain issues walloping the nation.

The higher costs and limited availability mean some families may get smaller servings or substitutions for staples such as peanut butter, which costs nearly double what it did a year ago. As holidays approach, some food banks worry they won’t have enough stuffing and cranberry sauce for Thanksgiving and Christmas.

“What happens when food prices go up is food insecurity for those who are experiencing it just gets worse,” said Katie Fitzgerald, chief operating officer of Feeding America, a nonprofit organization that coordinates the efforts of more than 200 food banks across the country.

Food banks that expanded to meet unprecedented demand brought on by the pandemic won’t be able to absorb forever food costs that are two to three times what they used to be, she said,

Supply chain disruptions, lower inventory and labor shortages have all contributed to increased costs for charities on which tens of millions of people in the U.S. rely on for nutrition. Donated food is more expensive to move because transportation costs are up, and bottlenecks at factories and ports make it difficult to get goods of all kinds.

If a food bank has to swap out for smaller sizes of canned tuna or make substitutions in order to stretch their dollars, Fitzgerald said, it’s like adding “insult to injury” to a family reeling from uncertainty.

US Inflation Reaches 30 YEAR HIGH, Up 6.2% Over 12 Months

Oklahoma court overturns $465m opioid ruling against Johnson & Johnson

The Oklahoma supreme court on Tuesday overturned a $465m opioid ruling against drugmaker Johnson & Johnson, finding that a lower court wrongly interpreted the state’s public nuisance law in the first case of its kind in the US to go to trial.

The ruling was the second blow this month to a government case that tried to hold drugmakers responsible for the national epidemic of opioid abuse. Public nuisance claims are at the heart of some 3,000 lawsuits brought by state and local governments against drugmakers, distribution companies and pharmacies.

The court ruled in a 5-1 decision that in 2019 a district judge, Thad Balkman, was wrong to find that New Jersey-based J&J and its Belgium-based subsidiary Janssen Pharmaceuticals violated the state’s public nuisance statute.

“The court has allowed public nuisance claims to address discrete, localized problems, not policy problems,” said the opinion written by Justice James R Winchester.

“J&J had no control of its products through the multiple levels of distribution, including after it sold the opioids to distributors and wholesalers, which were then disbursed to pharmacies, hospitals, and physicians’ offices, and then prescribed by doctors to patients.”

The ruling also said the company had no control over how patients used the products.

DoJ to investigate Alabama’s sewage failures over possible discrimination

Four years after a shocking discovery revealed hookworm in the US’s rural south, the justice department has announced it will investigate sanitation failures in Lowndes county, a majority Black county in Alabama. “Sanitation is a basic human need,” said Kristen Clarke, assistant attorney general for the justice department’s civil rights division, on Tuesday. “Bold action is needed to ensure that no one in this country is unjustifiably subjected to illness or harm resulting from inadequate access to safe sewage services.”

The crux of the federal investigation is whether access to sanitation systems in Alabama’s Lowndes county is based on race. The DoJ will examine whether the state and county health departments violated the civil rights of Black residents in Lowndes county, by blocking their access to adequate sanitation systems, thereby increasing their risk of a host of health problems such as parasitic infections. “We will conduct a fair and thorough investigation of these environmental justice concerns and their impact on the health, life and safety of people across Lowndes county, Alabama,” said Clarke.

A 2017 study found that hookworm, an intestinal parasite which was once widespread in North America but had not been detected in the US since the 1980s, was thriving in Lowndes county. The study was conducted by researchers from the Baylor College of Medicine, working together with the non-profit Alabama Center for Rural Enterprise (now called the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice). ...

Residents of Lowndes have been raising the alarm for years, prompting the United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights to criticize the dire lack of adequate sewerage in 2017. “The justice department is committed to fully enforcing our federal civil rights laws to address the legacy of environmental injustice that we face across the country,” Clarke said. “That commitment includes the failure to provide basic wastewater infrastructure, in historically marginalized and overburdened communities of color.”

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Adam Schiff GRILLED On The View Over Role In Promoting Russiagate HOAX, Steele Dossier

Trump ‘throws sand’ in gears of Capitol attack inquiry amid legal setbacks

Donald Trump has suffered a series of legal setbacks and more loom, as he wages a court battle to thwart a House committee from obtaining White House records for its inquiry into the 6 January Capitol assault and a new grand jury begins hearing evidence about possible crimes by his real estate firm.

Former justice officials and legal scholars say Trump’s long-standing penchant for using lawsuits to fend off investigations and opponents is looking weaker now that he’s out of the White House and facing legal threats on multiple fronts. ...

DoJ lawyers and experts say that Trump’s legal fortunes now look grimmer, and that his current battle royale to block the House inquiry into the Capitol riot by his allies seems quite weak, though it may delay the inquiry for months.

“Trump’s current assertions of a privilege against the disclosures are almost identical to the baseless claims of an absolute immunity that he advanced repeatedly – and the supreme court rejected – when he was president,” said Donald Ayer, a former deputy attorney general in the George HW Bush administration, in a Guardian interview.

Ayer added that “Trump is just blowing smoke and trying to throw sand in the gears of the select committee investigation. Congress, the administration, and the courts need to quickly and emphatically say no and press ahead with the investigation.”

Federal judge refuses Trump request to block Jan. 6 records

A federal judge on Tuesday rejected former President Donald Trump’s request to block the release of documents to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

In denying a preliminary injunction, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan said Congress had a strong public interest in obtaining records that could shed light on a violent insurrection mounted by the former president’s supporters. She added that President Joe Biden had the authority to waive executive privilege over the documents despite Trump’s assertions otherwise.

Barring a court order, the National Archives plans to turn over Trump’s records to the committee by Friday. But Trump’s lawyers swiftly promised an appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The case will likely eventually head to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“At bottom, this is a dispute between a former and incumbent President,” Chutkan wrote. “And the Supreme Court has already made clear that in such circumstances, the incumbent’s view is accorded greater weight.”

Capitol rioter facing charges for assaulting officers seeks asylum in Belarus

A US man who faces criminal charges for participating in the 6 January riot at the US Capitol is seeking asylum in Belarus, the country’s state TV has reported in a development likely to heighten tensions between the turbulent ex-Soviet nation and the United States. The man, Evan Neumann, 48, of California, acknowledged in an interview with the state TV channel Belarus 1 that he was at the Capitol on 6 January but rejected the charges, which include assaulting police, obstruction and other offenses. The channel aired excerpts of the interview on Sunday and promised to release the full version on Wednesday. ...

Neumann told Belarus 1 that his photo had been added to the FBI’s most wanted list, after which he left the country under the pretense of a business trip. Neumann, who owns a handbag manufacturing business, traveled to Italy in March, and then through Switzerland, Germany and Poland he got to Ukraine and spent several months there. He said he decided to illegally cross into neighboring Belarus after he noticed surveillance by Ukraine’s security forces. “It is awful. It is political persecution,” Neumann told the TV channel.

Belarusian border guards detained the American when he tried to cross into the country in mid-August, and he requested asylum in Belarus. Belarus doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the US. ...

The Belarus 1 anchors described Neumann as a “simple American, whose stores were burned down by members of the Black Lives Matter movement, who was seeking justice, asking inconvenient questions, but lost almost everything and is being persecuted by the US government.” In a short preface to the interview, the Belarus 1 reporter also said that “something” made Neumann “flee from the country of fairytale freedoms and opportunities” – an apparent snub towards the US, which has levied multiple sanctions against Belarus over human rights abuses and violent crackdown on dissent.

New Yorkers reject expanded voting access in stunning result

Amid an array of discouraging election results for Democrats last week, there was one under-the-radar outcome that was especially perplexing. In New York, one of the country’s most progressive states, voters overwhelmingly rejected initiatives that would have expanded voting access in future elections.

The vote, which came in a year when Republican-led states have passed dozens of laws to restrict voting access, left voting rights advocates stunned.

One of the proposals would have paved the way for lawmakers to get rid of a longstanding states policy that requires voters to give an excuse if they want to vote by mail (34 states and the District of Columbia allow anyone to vote by mail for any reason). Another would have allowed people to register to vote on election day, a reform advocates believe significantly increases political participation.

None of the measures came anywhere close to passing. Republicans waged a well-funded and aggressive campaign to oppose the amendments, a move that caught supporters of the proposal off guard. The reforms were also hampered by low turnout and confusing wording on the ballot, which may have prompted some voters to choose to skip voting on the measures altogether. ...

“There was an assumption that of course it’ll pass because it’s New York. And unfortunately, we woke up Wednesday morning and saw that was definitely not true,” said Sarah Goff, the deputy director of the New York chapter of Common Cause, a watchdog group that supported the measures. “Republicans and conservatives treated these ballot initiatives like essential threats and moved accordingly. And we just did not see that from the institutional supporters that we would have liked to.”

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Cop26: world on track for disastrous heating of more than 2.4C, says key report

The world is on track for disastrous levels of global heating far in excess of the limits in the Paris climate agreement, despite a flurry of carbon-cutting pledges from governments at the UN Cop26 summit. Temperature rises will top 2.4C by the end of this century, based on the short-term goals countries have set out, according to research published in Glasgow on Tuesday.

That would far exceed the 2C upper limit the Paris accord said the world needed to stay “well below”, and the much safer 1.5C limit aimed for at the Cop26 talks. At that level, widespread extreme weather – sea-level rises, drought, floods, heatwaves and fiercer storms – would cause devastation across the globe.

The estimate stands in sharp contrast to optimistic forecasts published last week that suggested heating could be held to 1.9C or 1.8C, thanks to commitments announced at the talks, now in their second week and scheduled to end this weekend. Those estimates were based on long-term goals set out by countries including India, the world’s third-biggest emitter, which is aiming for net zero emissions by 2070.

By contrast, the sobering assessment of a rise of 2.4C from Climate Action Tracker (CAT), the world’s most respected climate analysis coalition, was based on countries’ short-term goals for the next decade.

The cow in the room: why is no one talking about farming at Cop26?

“The cow in the room is being ignored at this Cop,” says Carl Le Blanc of Climate Healers. “Animal agriculture has been taken off the agenda and put on the menu.” Le Blanc was one of a number of campaigners who joined climate marches on Saturday in Glasgow to demand action for a new sustainable food system. They fought strong gales to make their point with four giant inflatable animals tethered on ropes above their heads or strapped to the ground. Each symbolised a different problem of the livestock industry: a 40ft cow for methane, a chicken for Covid and health, a fish for microplastics, and a pig for obesity.

Many industry representatives and campaigners feel not enough attention has been paid to food and farming at Cop26, despite it being one of the keys to cutting emissions over the next few decades. Food served at the canteen has been criticised – nearly 60% of dishes contain meat or dairy, which campaign group Animal Rebellion described as the equivalent of “serving cigarettes at a lung cancer conference”.

During the two weeks of the conference, themes such as finance, energy and transport have been allocated their own days, but there has been no dedicated day for agriculture or food systems. Farming was included in Nature day on Saturday, where there was a lot of talk about protecting forests but less about cutting meat consumption, food waste and firm pledges to change farming subsidy systems.

Farming is a complex issue on the journey to net zero, as it is both a source and sink for emissions. About 20% of global emissions come from agriculture and land use, and this rises to more than 25% for the food system as a whole, which includes processing, packaging and transport. Yet huge amounts of carbon can be sequestered by modifying farmland, with the creation of more forests, healthier peatlands and wetlands. Although some argue that we should stop consuming animal livestock altogether, others believe that low densities of grazing animals such as cattle are an important part of creating farmland habitats that produce food and also provide a home for wildlife. ...

None of the presidents of the UK’s four farming unions present at Cop26 believe they should reduce livestock numbers in their respective countries, or that people need to reduce their meat consumption. They told the Guardian methane emissions could be dealt with through new technologies rather than reducing the number of cows on farms. Thomas Vilsack, the US secretary of agriculture says he believes Americans can carry on eating the same amount of meat while keeping the world within safe limits on global heating.

If Unhalted, Permian Basin Fracking Will Unleash 40 Billion Tons of CO2 by 2050

As activists at the COP26 summit continue to denounce the "massive" gap between wealthy governments' lofty rhetoric and their woefully inadequate plans for addressing the climate emergency, a new analysis of projected extraction in the Permian Basin in the U.S. Southwest exposes the extent to which oil and gas executives' refusal to keep fossil fuels in the ground puts humanity's future in jeopardy.

Released Tuesday by Oil Change International, Earthworks, and the Center for International Environmental Law, the second chapter of The Permian Basin Climate Bomb warns that if the drilling and fracking boom that has turned the Permian Basin into "the world's single most prolific oil and gas field" over the past decade is allowed to persist unabated for the next three decades, it will generate nearly 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide by mid-century.

Common Dreams summarized the first chapter of the six-part multimedia series—which includes an introductory video detailing how expanded fossil fuel extraction in the basin endangers vulnerable communities from New Mexico to the Gulf Coast and beyond—when it was published last month. The second installment of the report reveals the stark contrast between global climate targets and the current trajectory of oil and gas production in the Permian Basin.

"The Permian Basin has, for the past decade, been the site of an oil and gas boom of unprecedented scale," Lorne Stockman, research co-director at Oil Change International, said in a statement. "Producers have free rein to pollute and methane is routinely released in vast quantities. Oil exports fuel Permian production growth and today they constitute around 30% of US oil production."

"While climate science tells us that we must consume 40% less oil in 2030, Permian producers plan to grow production more than 50%" from 2021 to 2030, said Stockman. "This must not happen."

"If left unchecked," the report notes, "the Permian could continue to produce huge amounts of oil, gas, and gas liquids for decades to come. With global markets flush with Permian oil and gas, it can only be harder to steer the world's economy toward clean energy."

According to the report, the nearly 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide that would be emitted from burning the fossil fuels that corporate executives expect to extract from the Permian Basin by 2050 represent about 10% of the world's remaining "carbon budget," or the amount of pollution compatible with limiting global warming to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels by the century's end.

Moreover, "scientists studying methane emissions in the Permian Basin estimate that as much as 3.7% of gas production is being vented and leaked into the atmosphere," the report notes. "At this rate, methane emissions in the Permian Basin would emit over 9.5 billion tons of CO₂ equivalent (CO₂e) by 2050," which the authors compare to "taking 50 standard mile-long trains of coal out into the desert, dumping the coal, and just burning it in a giant pile" every day from 2021 until 2050.

The good news, says the report, is that roughly 80% of the projected carbon dioxide emissions "would come from burning the liquids and gas produced from new wells that were not in production at the end of 2020. This means much of this pollution could be prevented by simply ceasing to drill new wells."

The Biden administration, said Steven Feit, senior attorney at the Center for International Environmental Law, "must use all of the tools at its disposal to prevent the next decade in the Permian from being a repeat of the last. At a minimum, that means rejecting permits for new export facilities, petrochemical plants, and other fossil fuel infrastructure."

The fossil fuel industry's plan to expand oil and gas production in the Permian Basin, climate justice advocates argue, presents President Joe Biden with an opportunity to demonstrate whether his vow to tackle the climate crisis is legitimate, or just another public relations campaign.

"Unless President Biden defuses the Permian climate bomb exploding in my backyard," said Miguel Escoto, Earthworks West Texas field advocate and an El Paso resident, "we won't prevent catastrophic climate change or meet our national climate commitments."

The battle to protect ancient forests in Canada

Critics Say Behind-the-Scene Efforts by HBSC Prove Big Bank Climate Pledges 'Cannot Be Trusted'

An effort by global financial giant HSBC to water down an industry climate pledge exemplifies the fact that banks and other profit-driven companies "cannot be trusted" to end their complicity in the human-caused climate emergency, critics charged on Tuesday.

According to new reporting by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ), HSBC wrote to the Net-Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA)—the initiative started by Mark Carney, former head of the Bank of England—on behalf of 12 large banks, calling on the alliance to loosen restrictions and delay deadlines in order to keep the banks from having to commit to far-reaching climate action. The alliance requires banks to set targets to reach net-zero carbon emissions in their lending and investment portfolios by 2050, with an interim target set for 2030.

Writing on behalf of banks including JPMorgan Chase, Citi, and Bank of America, HSBC asked that the alliance remove from its pledge the list of high-emissions sectors for which banks are required to set net-zero targets for within 18 months of joining the NZBA.

The BIJ's Josephine Moulds reports that HSBC wanted to make the climate commitments from key sectors— including fossil fuels, agriculture, real estate, and steel—"less rigorous" by delaying new emissions reduction targets until 2025 or even 2030.

Under the NZBA, after setting targets for carbon-intensive sectors within 18 months, banks are required to set targets for the remaining sectors in which they invest within three years, but HSBC also asked that members be required to set net-zero targets only for industries with so-called "credible transition pathways," which "could be highly subjective," wrote Moulds.

HSBC has publicly committed to reaching net-zero carbon emissions, but organizations within the grassroots Stop the Money Pipeline coalition—which aims to hold "the financial backers of climate chaos accountable"—said the bank's private actions demonstrate its true position on the climate emergency.

"HSBC's public rhetoric on climate change can't be trusted," said Adam McGibbon, UK campaign lead at Market Forces. "Banks like HSBC know what the International Energy Agency has said—'net zero by 2050' means no new fossil fuel expansion, from this year. So it's staggering that a bank signed up to that target is doing everything it can to make sure that target can't be met."

According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, despite its public commitments and statements, HSBC "has resisted regulation of its activities to achieve that target" and in 2020 poured more than $23 billion into the fossil fuel industry.

Since committing to net-zero financed emissions by 2050 one year ago, reported the Bureau, HSBC has "helped Saudi Aramco, the world’s most polluting company, raise [$13.9 billion] and Qatar Petroleum raise [$12.4 billion] to fund the expansion of the world’s largest gas field."

The Stop the Money Pipeline pointed to a new analysis by researchers at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, showing that continuing to invest in fossil fuels will result in financial losses for governments and corporations, with early investors in renewable energy expected to profit in the coming decades.

"Time and time again we see banks launch voluntary climate initiatives which seem to be aimed purely at reaping PR benefits now, while postponing all concrete action as far into the future as possible," said Maaike Beenes, climate coordinator at BankTrack. "Eighteen months is already a lavish amount of time to set 2030 targets... And with half the world's fossil fuel assets expected to become worthless as soon as 2036, all this effort to delay action is not even in banks' own best interests."

The Global Climate Wall: Wealthy Nations Prioritize Militarizing Borders Over Climate Action

Worth a scan, I'm going to excerpt the author's takedown of Obama's speech at the COP...

COP26 climate summit ends in failure

One of the main apologists for global capitalism, perhaps the world’s leading practitioner of “blah, blah, blah,” former US President Barack Obama, made a day-long series of appearances Monday in Glasgow. His speech to the summit was not mere blather, although there was plenty of that, citing his island origins (he was born in Hawaii) as proof of his sympathy towards the beleaguered island nations that face being overwhelmed by rising ocean waters, and touting the record of his own administration in fighting climate change.
The truth is that during Obama’s eight years in the White House, the United States was continually at war—a not insignificant contribution to global warming—and American corporations created incalculable amounts of carbon and toxic waste. Obama delivered several thrusts against Russia and China, the major targets of American imperialism under the administration of Joe Biden, his former vice president. He denounced Russian President Vladimir Putin and China’s President Xi for not attending the summit, saying this demonstrated a “dangerous lack of urgency.”

He took credit for the purely illusory gains of the 2015 Paris climate agreement, while admitting that since then “we are nowhere near where we need to be.” And he openly threatened the living standards of American workers, declaring, “All of us have a part to play. All of us have work to do. All of us have sacrifices to make… But those of us who live in wealthy nations, those of us who helped to precipitate the problem... we have an added burden.”

He also used the occasion for a typically sanctimonious lecture to the youthful protesters outside, essentially telling them to go back to their home countries and become foot soldiers in capitalist politics. He advised them against being “purists,” in other words, telling them to join the political campaigns of the Democratic Party in the United States and similar parties of a completely corrupt and conformist character.

Obama is being reinforced by a delegation of congressional Democrats, and even a few Republicans, this week, as the climate summit draws to a close. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats will pretend that the infrastructure bill they just approved and the social spending and climate bill they just agreed to postpone add up to a huge US commitment to resolve the climate crisis.

The truth is just the opposite. Both the Democrats and Republicans are willing to slash the consumption of American workers in the name of climate change, but not to cut a penny of the profits of American corporations.

Biden strikes down Trump-era plan to remove northern spotted owl habitat

In a victory for the northern spotted owl, the Biden administration has struck down a Trump-era plan that would have removed more than 3.4m acres of critical habitat for the imperiled bird and opened the old-growth forests where it lives to logging.

The population of the small chocolate brown owl, which lives in forested areas in Washington, Oregon, and northern California, has been in decline for decades and has already lost roughly 70% of its habitat. Its numbers have plummeted 77% in Washington state, 68% in Oregon, and close to half in California, according to studies by the US Geological Survey, and biologists fear that further habitat reduction would put them on the path to extinction.

A controversial decision made by Trump’s interior secretary just five days before leaving office was widely viewed as a parting gift to the timber industry. The Fish and Wildlife Service has since found that there was “insufficient rationale and justification” to reduce the threatened owl’s habitat.

Under the new plan, roughly 204,000 acres – approximately 2% of the 9.6m acres designated as habitat for the owls in 2012 – will be made available for development while more than 3m will be restored and protected. The agency claims the exclusion of those lands from habitat designation will enable federal land managers to meet obligations to the logging industry and help limit catastrophic wildfires that continue to threaten forests in the west.

“The exclusions we are proposing now will allow fuels management and sustainable timber harvesting to continue while supporting northern spotted owl recovery,” said Martha Williams, principal deputy director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, in a statement issued when the rule revision was proposed in July.

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Also of Interest

Here are some articles of interest, some which defied fair-use abstraction.

Did Mexico’s AMLO Government Just Blink in Standoff With Global Energy Lobbies?

New Fed Report Shows High Leverage Poses Threat to U.S. Financial Stability: From Life Insurance Companies to Hedge Funds

Testimony: Ahmaud Arbery slaying defendant changed his story

The climate
disaster is here

How the rise of copper reveals clean energy’s dark side

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A Little Night Music

Johnny Young's South Side Blues Band - Tighten Up On It

Johnny Young & Big Walter - Sleeping With The Devil

Johnny Young - Stealin'

Johnny Young's South Side Blues Band - Kid Man Blues

Johnny Young - Deal The Cards

Johnny Young - Worried Man Blues

Johnny Young & his Chicago Blues Band - Slam Hammer

Johnny Young - Keep on Drinking

Johnny Young's South Side Blues Band - My Black Mare

Johnny Young and Big Walter - Strange Girl

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